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Sunday, 14 June 2009

Mother Jones and the National Review on the dubious quality of Sotomayor’s prose: “This apple’s the worst orange I’ve ever tasted.”

This past week, the attacks on Sotomayor have turned from what she’s said to how she’s said it. Conservatives began by hammering away
at the “weird, unidiomatic constructions and errors of punctuation and
grammar [in] her infamous 2001 ‘Wise Latina’ speech.” Now, I advocate
writing conference papers that “contain few expensive words and no Faulknerian feats of subordination”
on the grounds that no human being—not even the academic ones—can parse
grammatically complex arrangements of jargon on the fly, so I’m more
attuned than most to the fact that what passes for grammatical in English as she is spoke doesn’t pass muster in English as she is wrote. You can imagine, then, why I chafed at Heather McDonald’s criticism of Sotomayor’s unscripted speeches for containing errors endemic to spoken language. Just because an unscripted speech is transcribed after the fact doesn’t make it written; or, as per my talk, just because it can be put to paper doesn’t mean it was meant to be read there.

Judging the quality of her prose from her speeches, as McDonald and fellow Bench Memos writer Ed Whelan did, is an intellectually dishonest exercise for the simple reason that nobody (outside of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.) speaks in paragraphs. Not that this stops the other member of the Bench Memos team, Matthew J. Franck,
from claiming Sotomayor “writes” sentences that were clearly spoken
aloud; or that those sentences “begin with a thought and trail off
without saying much of anything after all, or double back and
contradict themselves,” i.e. that the transcription of her unscripted speech transcribed sentences that were clearly spoken aloud.

When I taught literary journalism, I always included Mark Singer’s profile of Errol Morris on the syllabus because it works both as an introduction to New Yorker-style profiles and a meta-methodological essay on how to approach transcriptions critically and responsibly. Here’s Singer transcribing Florence Rasmussen’s speech in Morris’s Gates of Heaven (1978):

If I could only get out. Drive my car. I’d get another
car. Ya . . . and my son, if he was only better to me. After I bought
him that car. He’s got a nice car. I bought it myself just a short time
ago. I don’t know. These kids—the more you do for them . . . He’ s my
grandson, but I raised him from two years old . . . I don’t see him
very often. And he just got the car. I didn’t pay for all of it. I gave
him four hundred dollars.

Singer responds to her outpouring by noting that

[w]ith an arresting instinct for symmetry, Florence
Rasmussen manages to contradict most of what she has to say. It seems
that she knows certain things, but then, in the next moment, she trots
out contrary information[:] I’d like to drive my car; but I might not
even have a car any longer, might have to buy a new one. I bought my
son—O.K., he’s not my son, he’s my grandson—a new car; well, I didn’t
pay for the whole thing, I gave him four hundred dollars, but anyway I
want my money back.

As viewers of The Fog of War
(2003) know, this technique works as powerfully on former Secretaries
of Defense as elderly Floridians, not because either is particularly
muddleheaded, but because Morris takes advantage of the infelicitous glitches that accompany the spontaneous production of spoken language. McDonald, Whelan, and Franck seem not to understand how language works.
They scoured “virtually all [Sotomayor's unscripted] speeches on the
Senate website” and discovered damning evidence that they were, in
fact, unscripted speeches; then, they lambasted those transcripts of
her unscripted speeches for failing to meet the standards demanded of
the written word, which proved to them that Sotomayor is “a mediocrity
as a writer.” Whelan even suggests she’s a hypocrite for “present[ing] herself as a stickler for good grammar” when her speeches contain constructions that would be ungainly, if not outright ungrammatical, on the page. How about we hoist Whelan by his own petard?

Well, it’s an unguarded moment where she says what folks
on the left think which, their job is to use judicial robes to make
sound policy and the law is largely a vessel for them to fill with
their own preferences.

Sure, very much along the same lines, talking about what he calls the criterion but which selecting judges.

Well, how is that honoring people who put their lives at risk in
public service and, look, at 9/11 we understood for a while what
firefighters do.

Whelan clearly offends Franck’s standards: he “writes sentences that
begin with a thought and trail off without saying much of anything
after all.” The first sentence subordinates a clause about as clunkily
as you can imagine; then you read the second sentence, observe that it
doesn’t even include the subordinate clause it introduces, and marvel
at the paucity of your imagination. I suppose that second sentence
meets Franck’s standard on a technicality—the sentence defies the laws
of grammar and stops before it has a chance to trail off without saying
much of anything—but that third sentence turns on a dime “and, look,”
informs us that we know “what firefighters do.” Does that count as
“much of anything”?

They do eventually get around
to criticizing Sotomayor’s prose on the basis of what she’s actually
written: they find that while it’s not “ungrammatical,” it is “tedious
and ‘impenetrable.’” That link leads to Stephanie Mencimer’s article in Mother Jones,
in which she pings Sotomayor’s prose for “rarely hit[ting a] sort of
breezy cadence [because she] devotes the bulk of her legal analysis to
quotes from statutes, regulations, and other opinions ad nauseam[.]”
How she’ll legislate from the bench when she’s busy citing dull
precedent is as mysterious to me as, for example, how a prose-scold
could write “quote” instead of “quotation” in the middle of a complaint
or believe Diane Wood’s summary of Merchant of Venice signifies much of anything in the Age of Wikipedia.

In the end, the case against Sotomayor basically amounts to this: on
the one hand, her speeches betray all the ungrammatical tics common to
spoken language, and if you treat those speeches as prose, you must
conclude that she’s a poor writer; on the other, the prose of her legal
opinions isn’t ungrammatical, but because it betrays the tedious tics
common to lawyerly prose, you must conclude she’s a poor writer. You
see where this is headed. If word leaked out that “Ed Whelan” was
actually Sotomayor’s pseudonym, the Bench Memos team would
argue that, because Whelanmayor did all that I documented above, you
must conclude that s/he’s a poor writer. Were it then revealed that
Whelanmayor did Diane Wood one better and actually wrote Merchant of Venice, the Bench Memos team
would claim that, in light of the difficulty of Shakespelanmayor’s
prose, the Western Canon requires immediate revision and you must
conclude s/he’s a poor writer . . .

Comments

Your argument rests entirely on your unfounded and mistaken assertion that the speeches of Judge Sotomayor that are being criticized were "unscripted." In fact, Sotomayor's Senate questionnaire response makes clear that she is providing copies of "prepared draft texts" of her speeches. It is those "prepared draft tests," not after-the-fact (and non-existent) transcripts, that are the target of discussion.

The name "Bench Memos" has a very appropriate 'reject' undertone to it ("Sorry Ed, gonna have to leave you on the bench for this one!"); this kind of sophistry would get them blacklisted from the lucrative field of village idiocy.

Sorry, it's rude of me to say "them" when Ed's right here in the room, so to speak...

That she wrote the speeches beforehand does not ameliorate your failure, Ed (namely, your assessment of a speech as something other than a speech; funnily enough, it would probably behoove you to have a read of Scott's criticism of Zach Snyder's little Watchmen movie, which undertook a similarly thankless task); but by all means, hoist that dudgeon high!

Second, you ought to read the other links, too, because I addressed the problem with treating speeches as written documents even when they're written down at length in one of them. A "prepared draft text" isn't a written document in the manner you want it to be. For example, I deliberately misspell certain words I have difficulty pronouncing when I rehearse my presentations, so if I presented you with a "prepared draft text" of one of them, you'd find it riddled with errors designed to prevent someone who spent eight years in speech therapy learning how not to sound deaf from stumbling over his own words. (It's also why---and this is to the audience more than Ed---you'll never find me discussing squirrels ever. I simply cannot, no matter how hard I try, wrap my lips around the word.)

SEK: You say that you “chafed” at “criticism of Sotomayor’s unscripted speeches,” and you lead your readers to believe that folks have been criticizing speeches that were “transcribed after the fact.” As I’ve pointed out, what folks have criticized are Sotomayor’s “prepared draft texts” (her phrase) of her speeches. In other words, your entire post rests on the mistaken premise that her speeches were unscripted.

I don’t dispute that the text of a prepared speech will read differently than the text of an essay. But I don’t see how that observation bears meaningfully on the criticisms that have been offered.

Rather than acknowledge your error, you instead fault me for not recognizing that your links might indicate that you could have written a different post in which you tried to defend Sotomayor’s scripted speeches.

Bracketing the argument at hand, which is Scott's: now that we have your ear, EW, I'd to point out the obvious. Obama's going to get his justice, almost certainly S., but, if not, someone else who's, like S., closer to liberal than conservative core values. So, what's your point? Are you just aiming to keep a Harriet Miers-grade lightweight from the court? Maybe? Just throwing you a line here, because it really seems to me that you're wasting your time.

Before I move to my actual comment, I'm going to put a disclaimer right here: I'm not an academic, my wife is, and she'll probably clobber me for trying to describe her work. And I can't give a direct cite, because I don't have the reference handy. But...

A couple of years ago, my wife did a poster session on speech errors, and while I don't entirely remember the point of the poster, I remember this: there was a strong correlation between error rates and the structure of the paragraph. If I remember correctly, planning-related disfluencies occurred early in paragraphs. Interesting to me was the fact that the paragraph structure they used for the analysis came from transcripts.

The transcripts were done by a third party, who listened to the original spoken material and structured it however they felt was appropriate. But the error rate correlation *matched* the structure the transcriber provided, implying that the speaker had a similar structure in their mind while speaking.